The Effect of Face on Social Media (Facebook) Impressions

Riley Buchanan

   The purpose of this essay is to examine the effect of including a face in the image on social media posts on engagement. The relationship between a face present on a social media post and engagement was explored by reading literature on the biological and psychological studies of human facial recognition and analyzing the data points on the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute’s Facebook page. This essay will summarize previous research and studies on the biological process that relates to facial recognition, the social necessity of facial analysis, and the effect of faces on attention, define the hypothesis, list the data collected, and suggest implications based on the information found. 

   Facial recognition is one of the most important visual recognition tasks for human beings because of biology, the social implications, and psychology. Facial recognition is a biological process that has been found to occur rapidly and automatically. The analysis for and identification of faces has evolved and mastered as time has gone on. This process occurs almost instantaneously “with a significant region of cortex dedicated to face processing” (Walder, et al. 2020, p. 2). Facial recognition has become such an essential and repetitive task that the human brain delegates a specific area for this objective. As humans take in their surroundings, it has become evident that faces are “prioritized by attention” during this “visual search” through research and studies (Langton et al., 2008, p. 339). This coincides with electrophysiological evidence that “face-selective neurons in the anterior STS exhibit a degree of selectivity to gaze direction in macaques” (Palmer and Clifford, 2020, p. 1010). Even humans’ close relatives, an old genus of monkeys, are attuned to faces. Humans are so wired to detect faces that the brain perceives them when they are not even there; this phenomenon is called pareidolia, which can be “understood as a striking false positive in these systems, in which visual mechanisms that are specialized to detect and extract sensory cues from human faces are spontaneously recruited in the absence of a real human form” (Palmer and Clifford, 2020, p. 1001). The brain will scan an area for faces and can mistake a figure with something that resembles eyes and a mouth–such as two dots and a line–for a face. In summary, at the biological level, studies show that human faces are deemed important to the human brain’s systematic processing by delegating attention to automatically scan for faces. 

   The process to recognize and analyze faces has been refined through evolution. Humans have adapted to quickly carry out this process to better survive in social situations. This process is “not simply a product of human culture” (Palmer and Clifford 2020, p. 1002). It is more biological than that; it is driven by features of the nervous system that are shared across primate species (Palmer and Clifford, 2020). There are higher-level sensory mechanisms in visual systems that have developed to extract and encode specific content from human faces (Palmer and Clifford, 2020). In social situations, humans use the information from facial expressions to respond accordingly. For example, human faces expressing a negative emotion are detected more efficiently than faces expressing a neutral emotion (Sato and Kawahara, 2014). This is because humans have more necessity and urgency to respond to a negative stimulus. Socially, if someone is showing signs of fear or anger, one would respond to that faster with more necessity than if a person appeared content or neutral. Investigation of face detection in visual noise has suggested the eye and mouth regions are important features in modulating the response of face-selective visual areas (Walder et al., 2020). Again, this is when the phenomenon of pareidolia comes into play. An inanimate object that resembles having a face is often perceived as having social qualities, such as gaze direction, because of mechanisms in our visual system that are spontaneously engaged by objects with facelike visual characteristics (Palmer and Clifford, 2020). Humans personify objects when an eye and mouth region are identified as a result of the brain quickly scanning for a face and trying to assess how to respond to the facial expression that is perceived. 

   After understanding that the human brain prioritizes faces in a setting, scientific studies were conducted to quantify the relative effect of the presence of a face on attention. In one study, participants were asked to identify the different objects among other non-face objects. Some series included a human face and the control groups did not. One experiment established that faces are processed automatically, but it was unclear whether these results mean that faces capture attention regardless of observers’ goals (Sato and Kawahara, 2014). One part of the experiment, their Experiment 4, supported the hypothesis that faces break through observers’ behavioral goal of searching for a letter of specific color and capture attention (Sato and Kawahara, 2014), which emphasizes the importance the human brain puts on face. In another set of experiments, a participant was asked to look for the butterfly in a group of objects, and it was found that the time taken to detect the presence of a butterfly target was increased by including a face in the display (Langton, et al., 2008). These results were interesting since the experiment was set up to make the presence faces irrelevant to the task at hand. This experiment supports that faces capture attention and that they are always searched when they appear in displays (Langton et al., 2008), thus implying an immediacy of facial search and recognition. An implication of these findings is that we may become consciously aware of faces before other non-face items (Langton et al., 2008). When tracking eye movement in relation to looking for a specific object,

reflexive shifts in spatial direction of an observer’s attention were found (Palmer and Clifford, 2020). Whether or not the eye is looking for a face, the gaze is shifted to the gaze immediately. Hypothesis: If a social media image includes a face, then the post will get more attention, measured by likes, shares, impressions, and reach 

   Data was collected by going through the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute’s first one hundred Facebook posts spanning from April 29, 2021 to January 19, 2022 and tracking whether or not the post had a face present and the number of likes, shares, impressions, and reach the post had on an Excel sheet. After gathering the numbers for each individual post, the average number of likes, shares, impressions, and reach were calculated for posts that had no face present and posts with a face present. The averages are as follows:

Table 1 Average likes, shares, impressions, and reach based on a face in the social-media image

Excel software was used to calculate correlation coefficients for the relationship between face and likes, shares, impressions, and reach. The correlation coefficients are as follows: 

Table 2 Correlation of likes, shares, impressions, and reach and face present in the social media image 

In conclusion, when promoting on social media, it is effective to incorporate faces into social media posts to increase engagement. By looking at the biological, social, and psychological mechanisms behind facial recognition, it is logically supported that social media that includes a face would hold viewers’ attention for longer and increase engagement, as exemplified by the Gregory Grappone Humanities Institute’s Facebook page.

References 

Langton, S. R., Law, A. S., Burton, A. M., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2008). Attention capture by faces. Cognition, 107(1), 330–342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.012

Palmer, C. J., & Clifford, C. W. G. (2020). Face pareidolia recruits mechanisms for detecting human social attention. Psychological Science, 31(8), 1001–1012.  https://doi.org/10.1177/095679762092414

Sato, S., & Kawahara, J. I. (2014). Attentional capture by completely task-irrelevant faces. Psychological Research, 79(4), 523–533. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0599-8 

Wardle, S. G., Taubert, J., Teichmann, L., & Baker, C. I. (2020). Rapid and dynamic processing of face pareidolia in the human brain. Nature Communications, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18325-8

Riley Buchanan is a senior Marketing Major and Graphic Design Minor.  She is the Programming Director at the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute and enjoys attending and taking part in the various programs by the other institutions and organizations on campus.  When off campus, she is probably with her family, friends, and/or pets at the beach, reading, listening to music, painting, or all of the above all at once.  She is grateful for the opportunities that Saint Anselm College has presented and the faculty that has supported, especially Professor Rong Huang with the Social Media Marketing project featured in this issue of humanitas.